Sunday, June 21, 2009

How advertising inadvertently sometimes sends the wrong message

I dont't know how many of you have seen the latest ad of IE8. It shows a hot chick enjoying her ice cream and a guy sitting at a distance enjoying the sight and apparently fantasizing. However, a fat man comes and stands in the middle and and the guy sitting cannot see the girl anymore and is understandably disgusted. Fantasies can crash - the message is flashed. An IE8 popup saying "Your last browsing session ended unexpectedly", with the options "Restore Session" and "Go to Home Page", is shown. Obviously the "Restore Session" option is chosen and the guy can see the girl smiling at him. He heaves a sigh of relief. Automatic Crash Recovery in the next generation Internet Explorer 8. Let's you start from where you stopped. The ad is trying to showcase a new feature in IE8 - Automatic Crash Recovery. The way the ad has been shot will surely get your attention. And then you get to know about the new feature in IE8. Cool way to advertise - or should I say hot? Well, I happened to upgrade my IE7 to IE8 a few days back. But as soon as I started with IE8, it crashed. Of course the crash recovery option came up when i restarted and it promptly restored my session, which was nothing but my facebook homepage. But guess what, it crashed again and I restored the session again and it crashed again. This went on and on for a couple of minutes after which I switched back to Chrome and Firefox. Smooth sailing, no more crashes. So when this morning I saw that ad and the message "Fantasies can crash", I was like "Sure they can crash! If you are using IE. If you dont want them to crash, use something else!" The interesting point here was I perceived the ad in a completely different way because I had a previous negative experience. But my question is, should one advertise such a feature? I don't see it as a nice feature because it reminds me that this piece of software crashes. All software do, including Firefox and Chrome, but why highlight it? By advertising the Automatic Crash Recovery you are in a way highlighting the fact that your software crashes. As a user I see this as a negative rather than a positive feature. Is such advertising good? What do you think?